Puffbox

Simon Dickson's gov-tech blog, active 2005-14. Because permalinks.

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    Questions to the Prime Minister!

    Downing Street’s journey ever deeper into new media continues… as Sky’s Joey Jones observes, ‘cyberspace probably seems the safest place for Gordon Brown right now.’

    And on the day he addresses Google’s Zeitgeist Europe conference, apparently to announce ‘a number of areas (plural? hmm…) where the UK Government and technology giant Google are planning to work together’, he also becomes the latest politician to invite questions from YouTubers. See their London Mayoral efforts, or the US-based YouChoose for other examples… or indeed, the Rolling Stones.

    I’m not entirely sure about these ‘ping-pong’ video interviews… they’re certainly better than the mock-TV studio efforts which Labour have tried before, but I worry about a channel where the questions are often longer than the answers.

    You’ve got until 21 June to record and submit your question, with responses to follow ‘at the end of June’… although they’re describing it as ‘regular’, so there should be further chances later.

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    Web as a weapon: visionary stuff from Gordon Brown

    It didn’t generate much media coverage, but there were some stirring words in Gordon Brown’s speech on Saturday to the Church of Scotland general assembly. One of the recurring criticisms levelled against him has been a lack of a defining vision: well, try this one for size.

    The greatest arsenal of power today is not nuclear or biological or chemical but people – the discovery of our capacity to come together across borders and oceans and to stand together as one. And what I want to argue is that the joining of these two forces – the information revolution and the human urge to co-operate for justice – makes possible for the first time in history something we have only dreamt about: the creation of a truly global society.

    A global society where people anywhere and everywhere can discover their shared values, communicate with each other and do not need to meet or live next door to each other to join together with people in other countries in a single moral universe to bring about change. I believe that these vast and swiftly summoned movements of people coming together can now become the most powerful weapon for justice ever put in human hands.

    It’s great to see a politician, the Prime Minister indeed, going a step beyond the ‘information revolution’ phase, and talking about the impact on society and human relationships both nearest and distant. Steadily we’re seeing The Establishment start to recognise how far the transformation goes. But one wonders if the PM will feel it even more directly after the Crewe by-election on Thursday night: the Tory bloggers, like the party they support, are pushing as hard as they possibly can.

    Interestingly, what little media coverage there was – particularly in the Scottish papers – has been overwhelmingly positive for the PM; in stark contrast to virtually everything else from the nationals lately. ‘If Gordon Brown was Prime Minister of a better Britain, then his speech yesterday would have confirmed this son of the manse as the man Britain believes is right to run the country,’ writes Scotland on Sunday’s Kenny Farquharson. The Sunday Mail was even more direct: ‘On his home turf he showed that he is still the man to lead Britain.’ It’s not all bad out there.

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    Movie critic Kermode takes video-blogs into mainstream

    I’ve always been a big fan of Mark Kermode, movie critic, broadcaster and visiting fellow at the University of Southampton. Prior to podcasting, I would schedule my Fridays to allow me to hear his Five Live segments with Simon Mayo. And yet curiously, I’m not really a movie fan (although I sometimes think I could have been). And besides, I’m now the devoted parent of a toddler. Cinemas are off my agenda for the foreseeable.

    Kermode has one thing in his favour: passion. He really cares about movies, and he’s quite prepared to show it. It’s almost as if that passion is what attracts me, more than the subject matter. It’s the same with Clarkson & co on Top Gear. Since last summer’s floods I no longer own a car, and I don’t get especially excited by them. But Top Gear is must-see TV. (Indeed, as my wife puts it, she loves Top Gear apart from the car bits. That kinda sums it up.)

    So it’s great to see Kermode being the subject of the BBC’s latest blogging project – and, if I’m not mistaken, their first true ‘video blog’. And yes, guess what, it’s great stuff.

    Let’s look at the mechanics of it. The ‘entries’ use the BBC’s embedded video player (which finally works on my system!)… and look terrific in full-screen. They’re limited to 2 minutes, ish… and they’re mostly a fixed camera pointing at his head and shoulders, with the occasional still image or trailer excerpt dropped in for variety. No clever production, no smart-arse video effects, no background muzak. Frankly, nothing you couldn’t do yourself with a dead cheap camera, probably even a half-decent phone, and a YouTube account.

    Why does it work? It’s all down to Kermode himself, once again. A warm and engaging personality, a thorough knowledge of his subject, a sense of what makes a good anecdote. He’s clearly comfortable in front of a mic or camera; he goes in knowing what he’s going to say, but doesn’t seem to be reciting a half-memorised script – or worst of all, reading off an autocue. But mostly it’s his passion, genuine passion. His opinion on what constitutes a good film (almost) doesn’t matter.

    This is the first example I’ve seen of a ‘mainstream’ videoblog which really works (although as Dan Taylor points out, you can arguably trace it back to BBC2’s Video Nation); and it shows the power of video in personal engagement.

    There’s unquestionably a role for this in government and politics, giving MPs, ministers and candidates an opportunity to demonstrate the genuine passion they have for what they (want to) do (in theory). And this is the model they should aim to follow.

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    'It's getting easier, isn't it?'

    There was a sudden chill in the air when I uttered those words in a client meeting this week.

    We’re planning another high-profile WordPress-based website, with ‘mashing’ of RSS feeds from third-party sites like YouTube and Flickr a prominent ingredient. In practice, that means the site’s photo galleries and video streaming have been ‘contracted out’ to the companies recognising as the best in the world. And courtesy of their RSS feeds, we’ll be able to display the latest additions on the site, more or less seamlessly. The main site will be updated automatically, as soon as you upload your image or clip, give or take a slight delay for feed cacheing. And the media items will be available to members of those sites’ communities worldwide, making it easier to find and (theoretically) share.

    My mind inevitably drifted back to the Bad Old Days, and the weeks I spent discussing, writing and reviewing Functional Specifications. I can imagine how long it would have taken, a couple of years back, to get anything like the functionality which Flickr and YouTube offer me, free of charge, in a matter of moments. And for all the risks of using a third-party service, with no formal SLA per se, I’ve yet to see things go any more wrong than any equivalent function you might have commissioned from one of the Big Ugly Consultancies. (If at all.)

    Case in point: It took a couple of hours last week – from a standing start – to decide to use Flickr for photos from the regional launches of NHS future visions, as chronicled by the Our NHS Our Future website, and work out how we might do it. The images are now featuring (automatically, courtesy of Flickr’s tag feeds) in the popups on the homepage map. It makes the whole thing much more personal and human… which is entirely in keeping with the exercise itself. And it’s basically Flickr plus an RSS parser doing all the work.

    Fact is, it’s now outrageously easy to integrate best-of-breed video and photo functionality in any website. The technology is straightforward, and the (lack of a) pricetag means the bulk of the bureaucracy can be avoided. It used to be a case of ‘how would we do it?’. Now it’s more like ‘why aren’t we doing it?’.

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    Blears backs wider use of online petitions

    Writing on Comment Is Free, Hazel Blears reckons Labour’s problem is that it has become distanced from its voters. ‘The problem is the powerlessness within the system for the majority of people,’ she writes. ‘People feel that their views disappear into a black hole, without the slightest echo.’

    Hazel’s solution is ‘a healthy dose of direct democracy’: more directly elected mayors, a reinvigorated co-op movement, and online petitions. ‘Petitions, especially on-line, should be used to guide the deliberations of local councillors and ministers,’ she says. ‘Petitioners should be able to press for debates in council chambers and even parliament.’

    If that inspires anyone to set up their own petitions system… don’t forget that the Downing Street petitions system, built by MySociety, is ‘open source’, meaning you can download and use it free of charge.

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    'Our NHS' reskinned

    One of my favourite projects over the last year has been Our NHS, Our Future – the website for Lord Darzi’s review of the NHS. With the review entering its final stages, we’ve taken the opportunity to give the site a lick of paint, and reworked the homepage.

    Reflecting the local focus of the review, the centrepiece of the new homepage is a great big clickable map showing England broken up into its Strategic Health Authorities. Each SHA is publishing a ‘vision document’ over the next month or so: clicking the map will generate a popup with a news story about the document, or a ‘coming soon’ message. It’s all being done with PHP and Javascript, so the site manager only has to write and publish his story: everything else is automated from there. We’re also hoping to get photos from each launch event, which will get added into the map’s popups via Flickr’s tag feeds. (Not a huge enhancement: we’ve been consuming YouTube RSS feeds since last year.)

    This is the third iteration of the website in nine months: we launched initially in late August using Typepad, but moved to WordPress in November as Typepad showed its limitations. It perfectly demonstrates the value in adopting a blogging platform as your CMS: sure, the (base) content type is primitive… but it means the job of tweaking, redesigning or even migrating becomes so much easier.

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    MPs condemn lack of usage data

    The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee published its latest report on ‘Government on the Internet: Progress in delivering information and services online‘ a few weeks back. Much of it was pretty predictable: we know we don’t have an exact figure for the number of websites, we know we aren’t always brilliant on accessibility, and we’ve heard the social exclusion argument countless times (although we haven’t heard much from the Cabinet Minister responsible).

    (Correction: I see Paul Murphy gave his first speech as Minister for Digital Inclusion a week or two back. Details on the Puffbox-produced Wales Office website… and hey, also available in Welsh.)

    But its conclusions include some genuinely worrying data. ‘16% of government organisations have no data about how their websites are being used,’ it tells us – what, none at all? I’ve come across a few in my time, but never feared it was quite that many. Unforgivable in these post-Google Analytics days, surely. A quarter could provide no data on costs. Only 19% provided a full picture on cost and usage.

    I’m not sure I can accept the assertion, based on NAO data, that ‘overall the quality (of government websites) has improved only slightly since 2001 and one in six sites has become significantly worse’. But it leads to an interesting aside, which seems to call for government departments to embrace user-generated content..?

    The National Audit Office found that many government websites have yet to adopt approaches now commonplace among leading private sector websites. These include allowing users to post content onto websites and to provide comments about the services and information provided. … Some government sites are piloting such facilities, and some are well established including the online petitions facility on the 10 Downing Street website and the Department of Health’s feedback and testimonials site for NHS patients.

    But perhaps the most striking recommendation of all is the proposal that ‘no new (websites) should be established without the agreement of the Government’s Chief Information Officer in the Cabinet Office’. That might be enforceable on a domain name level… but it surely can’t be workable in terms of subdomains or microsites. (And that’s before we think about areas on external community sites, whose usage was endorsed by the Power Of Information work.)

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    Irrational(ised) Business Link

    I’ve just received an invite to attend a Free Business Advice Open Day, hosted by HMRC with the support and active participation of Business Link. Their glossy leaflet includes a URL on the front cover: www.businessadviceday.gov.uk. You can probably guess where I’m going with this.

    In November 2005, the Transformational Government strategy declared:

    For customer information, self-service transactions and campaign support, services will converge on Directgov and Business Link as the primary on-line entry points; service-specific or stand-alone solutions will be phased out.

    Er, so what is this site exactly? A stand-alone site with self-service transaction. And to make matters worse, there’s no reference anywhere in the leaflet to the main Business Link URL. (Interestingly, several of the other partner organisations include their URLs in their logos, making them actually better represented than Business Link!)

    A whois search reveals that the businessadviceday domain was actually registered more than a year after the Transformational strategy was published. There’s really little hope for rationalisation when customer-facing activity like this, on behalf of one of the primary beneficiaries of rationalisation, is being handled through stand-alone websites.

    PS: Today was actually the first time I’ve come across a whois which works for gov.uk – hosted by Janet. Well worth bookmarking, although its accuracy is limited. Most of the records for well-established domain names are listed as being ‘created’ in 2003, which clearly isn’t right. But basic contact details are generally included, and should provide a starting point at least.

  • Puffbox.com technical problems

    Apologies to anyone trying to access this website over the course of Thursday. Due to a slight misunderstanding with my ISP, the site was taken (briefly) offline. Thankfully, it’s all steadily resolving itself. But if you were trying to get a comment through to the website, or trying to email me since Wednesday evening, please try again.

    As it happens, it was a pretty simple hiccup. The automated email, sent ‘by’ my UK-based ISP, said I had to renew my domain by 05/06/2008. Each time a date was quoted, it was quoted in that same format. Not unreasonably, given that I’m dealing with a UK ISP, I took that to mean 5 June. It actually meant 6 May.

    It serves as a warning to anyone planning to deal trans-Atlantically… including, as in this case, companies outsourcing parts of their customer-facing activity. I bet I’m not the first to fall foul of this.

  • UK media endorses 'presidential' politics

    There’s a very interesting revelation in Sky election expert Michael Thrasher’s analysis of last week’s election results. He notes the fact that Sky’s calculation of gains and losses was very different to the BBC’s: a question of how they both chose to handle boundary and allegiance changes. (An ugly consequence of the UK’s ever-changing geography, but that’s for another time.)

    What intrigued me most was his revelation that the national media organisations have all agreed a common method for handling these calculations at the next general election, where similar boundary changes will also apply.

    The national broadcast organisations, BBC, ITN and Sky, together with the Press Association, have agreed a set of estimated results for the 2005 election in newly created constituencies that sit alongside the real ones for constituencies whose boundaries are unchanged. The calculation of each party’s gains and losses are based on these agreed figures. Furthermore, the figures will take no account of any by-election changes or changes of party allegiance by individual MPs in the meantime.

    In my mind, that effectively endorses ‘presidential politics’. You aren’t voting for an MP, you’re voting for a PM. It doesn’t matter if that MP changes allegiance; and by-elections can’t be taken seriously. The only count that counts is a general election.

    Sadly, as often happens in statistics, there’s no right and wrong answer. You could very justifiably argue that it’s always better to compare like with like. You could equally argue that we already have presidential politics by default anyway. And that turnout at general elections is generally higher than by-elections, making them a more valid measure. All of which would make this decision the right one. So I’m not arguing with that.

    It just seems a bit odd to see a formal institutional recognition that ultimately your choice of MP, whoever he/she is, and whatever happens to him/her do post-general election, is meaningless. So perhaps the only way forward for UK democracy is to recognise the presidential aspect, and separate the executive from the legislative. Yeah, like that’ll happen.